Barcelona Stays Mainly In Spain, But Its Essence Goes To London

For Exhibit

LONDON — Think of cities which have shaped today`s world and Barcelona, Spain, doesn`t leap instantly to mind. A major new London exhibition contends that it should.

``Homage to Barcelona`` is a rare attempt to transport one city to another. What justifies it is Barcelona`s uniquely formative contribution to the way we see, hear and even live.

Pablo Picasso, Juan Miro and Salvador Dali spent their early years in Barcelona, and their paintings had an incalculable effect on art, design and even advertising.

Mies van der Rohe`s famous and influential ``Barcelona`` chair was first shown in a pavilion he built for a Barcelona fair. The city spawned musicians like Manuel de Falla, Isaac Albeniz, Enri Granados and Pau (Pablo) Casals.

Above all, Barcelona originated a rich, flamboyant architecture which it called ``modernista`` and which everyone else came to call ``Art Nouveau.``

That exuberant style of curves and excesses has an indirect influence on buildings even now.

Barcelona`s greatest architect was Antonio Gaudi. His swirling, phantasmagoric buildings, sometimes coated with broken crockery, full of bulbous bulges and slinky curves, are all but impossible to describe.

They are also impossible to transport. The major problem with ``Homage to Barcelona: A City and Its Art 1888-1936`` is that London`s Hayward Gallery cannot display buildings.

Paintings are there in plenty--early and late works by Picasso, Dali and Miro, plus an exhaustive range of two generations of their contemporaries. Picasso spent his formative artistic years in Barcelona, and one intriguing item in the show is a 1901 charcoal portrait by Casa showing Picasso as a solemn, fresh-faced lad.

Sculpture studs the gallery and shares floor space with a few pieces of sensuous furniture, including an astonishing marquetry sofa-cabinet combination circa 1904.

But architecture is the queen of the show, as it is of the city, and she is displayed by proxy in photographs, floor plans, occasional details from actual buildings, and a seven-screen slide show.

Barcelona`s ``modernista`` school includes a surprising number of architects, most of whom are unknown. The undoubted star is Gaudi, an iconoclast who ``hated all schools`` and loathed the ``modernistas,`` says the show catalogue.

The show`s most astonishing architectural display is a walk-through cutaway model of Gaudi`s incredible Sagrada Familia (Sacred Family) church. The architect laid the foundation stone for the structure in 1882 and finished only one of its four towers before he was hit by a tram and killed in 1926. Construction teams now working on the church estimate it probably will take another 200 years to complete.

Encrusted with hundreds of sculptures, shaped in natural forms like waves and sand dunes and stalactites, the Sagrada Familia has been called everything from ``one of the most hideous buildings in the world`` to ``a poem in stone`` and ``one of the world`s most extraordinary churches.``